I just lost out on a Ebay bid for 140 vintage (1965-68) Twins baseball cards that went for 28 dollars... I had bid 27.11 and wasn't watching. The cards included everyone I remembered from those golden years... Bob Allison, Rich Rollins, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat... etc etc etc. Not in the top shape, but what memories they would have elicited!!! Aghghghghg. Such a deal will never come around again. That is what makes me all the more salty about it.

I was one key stroke away from bringing them home.

sadness and sighing

but perhaps whoever got them will enjoy them as much as I would have

but I doubt it.

I will simmer in this, I cannot help it.

Such silly things bring about petulance towards God.

Because he knew what could have been.

yes i know it is all for the best

but leave me to my grief

This morning we couldn't make it in to where we normally meet, so we just got together in our living room...

myself, my wife, my youngest daughter and her soon-to-be-wedded-to boyfriend, and my son

I simply shared on what had shaped my life up til now...

How I decided I must give myself to the one who made me, because I did not make myself...

How I determined He was not a God of caprice, like the Greek gods, but rather a God of unwavering Purpose...

 and how that purpose was motivated out of LOVE FOR US, even as it was actuated out of His own need

We read Ephesians 5, where Paul says the great mystery of marriage really involves Christ and the Church.

and reviewed how Eve came out of Adam's side, to be the strongest one at his side and closest to his heart...

(at this time I also explained how I knew, to my daughter, that her boyfriend was the person I would be handing her off to)

and then how Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11 how he espoused us all to Christ (which I take as individually),

meaning each one of us has this same relationship with Christ that the entire church has, and that each one of us has the Song of Songs as our own story.

I have been very down of late, and explained how this had to do with my own relationship with God, how that when you lose contact with this one we love 

we can feel betrayed, and become unreasonable, as those who have lost our Purpose...

and yet how this was also part of the story, like the six days in Genesis, when there is evening and then morning... to an even greater Day.

AFTERWARDS however, I discovered

my wife thought I was talking of her as the one who was the betrayer,

my daughter thought I was talking about them (my children),

and my son-in-law-to-be thought I was talking about some woman I was in a relationship before I met my wife!!!

SOOO I had to get everyone together as soon as I found all this out to make it clear

I was talking about me and

God.

What romance.

No matter how much I tell my wife how much I love and appreciate her, it cannot undo what I have done in betraying that love over the years

in my NOT coming through for her or being there for her

Sadly, though she once loved me in that kind of starry-eyed way

now she loves me "with knowledge"

as she would one of our children (well, maybe she does admire me in some sort of way she did when she first married me...)

So she bears that wound that only a woman can know

which is the sadness of experienced loss of innocence, which I suppose every human being experiences at some point

but which women seem to have to bear more than anyone, since they put their existential hope into a man whom they were created for

and yet who does not fulfill that for which they have waited and kept themselves all their lives

and yet even so that does not justify those, such as the feminist, who says, "I do not need a man..."

(Just as we somehow know it is not right to tell a child there is no Santa Claus, I suppose)

Because it is the PROMISE of LIFE that counts, and the PROMISE REMAINS TRUE even if it is misplaced,

and we find we must bear the one we thought would bear us instead

(sigh) (I say for my wife, whom I find to be everything and more I myself wished her to be....)